Edward James Corbett

JIM CORBETT......


Joseph, the grandfather of Edward James (Jim) Corbett, was born in the parish of St Peter's, Belfast in 1796. Before his marriage to Harriet he had been a monk and she a novice at a nearby convent. They both broke their holy vows and 'eloped' to be married.

Joseph joined the army on 15 June 1814 and on the recruitment documents he signed on for unlimited service as an infantry private. On 26 July 1814 he and Harriet set sail from Ireland on the Royal George bound for India. At that time he gave his profession as that of carver and gilder, a trade, perhaps, which he had learned as a monk. They had with them their first child Eliza who was one year old and they disembarked in India on 7 February 1815.


Joseph, the grandfather of Edward James (Jim) Corbett
In 1817 he was posted to the horse artillery and continued his service with them until his death on 28 March 1830 when he was a sergeant. He was only 33 and was buried at Meerut. His military record gives his description: 5'4" tall, a long face with sallow colouring, hazel eyes and black hair.

He and Harriet had nine children. Eliza, who had been born in Belfast on 18 May 1812; Mary born in 1814 and later married to Patrick Dease on 7 July 1831; John born in 1816; Joseph in 1818; Catherine in 1820; Christopher William in 1822; Richard Henry in 1824; Harriet in 1826 and lastly Thomas Bartholomew born in 1828. Details of only three of these children have been found.

Mary's husband, Patrick Dease became a consultant engineer to the Government of Bombay and they had eight children. Thomas Bartholomew, their youngest child, became a hero and sons were named after him in the next two generations. He was captured by mutineers at a siege of the Red Fort in Delhi and was roped to a stake and burned alive before the fort was relieved. His brother, Christopher William, who also fought at Delhi, saw his younger brother die and joined the Army. There are memorial tablets at St James church, Delhi for Thomas Bartholomew dated 11 and 17 May 1857: 'Sacred to the memory of the following members of a family murdered during the massacre of the Christians at Delhi between the 11th and 17th of May 1857. Thomas McNally, 2nd Clerk Commissariat Office, Delhi. Thomas Bartholomew Corbett, Assistant Apothecary and Sub-Medical Dept., Charlottefr Corbett, Harriet Corbett. Her brothers shall rise again.'

JIM CORBETTChristopher William Corbett had been born on 11 September 1822 at Meerut and was Joseph and Harriet's sixth child. At that time his father was a corporal in the horse artillery. Christopher William joined the army and saw active service as a junior medical officer. His rank was that of an Assistant Apothecary (which had been the same rank as that of his brother Thomas Bartholomew) when he was twenty; he was with the 3rd Troop of the 1st Brigade of Horse Artillery. He saw action on the north west frontier during the 1st Afghan War (1839-42). Eventually he was promoted to Apothecary Lieutenant and Captain.

On 19 December 1845 he was posted to Dehra Dun and there he married eighteen year old Ann Morrow at Landour, Mussoorie, a military cantonment. He was then posted to the Army of Sutlej for the Sikh Wars. He and Ann had three children and she died in her early twenties. In 1849 he was in the Army of the Punjab as a Hospital Steward to the Bengal Army. He received several medals for his service.

Mary Jane Prussia, whom Christopher William was later to marry, had married Dr. Charles James Doyle of Agra when she was 14 years old in 1851, he being 21. They had four children. These were Charles, George, Evangeline (who died of smallpox as an infant), and Eugene Mary. Charles and George became doctors, Charles graduating from Aberdeen and practicing in Magdalene Street, Norwich in 1878. After the Great War he emigrated to California and later became an author. George was appointed Colonial Surgeon in the West Indies.

Mary Jane and her children suffered great privations during the Indian Mutiny (when she was still only 20). The European community of Agra were sent to the fort for safety. Her husband, Charles Doyle, was in command of the remnants of the Etawah Light Horse and the 13th Troop of Police Cavalry. In November 1858 rebels attacked Etawah and Doyle's unit took part in defeating them. On December 8 whilst fighting, having already killed 2 mutineers by sword whilst on horseback, Charles Doyle was dragged from his saddle and killed. In the church at Etawah there is a plaque in his honour. He was buried in the churchyard.

JIM CORBETT IN DHIKALANow widowed Mary Jane Doyle and her children moved to Mussoorie where she met Christopher William Corbett. He had left the army and joined the post office as a Postmaster at Mussoorie in 1859. They were married on 13 October 1859. Between them they had, by their previous marriages, 6 children.

In 1862 he was appointed Postmaster of Naini Tal, a hill station which was about 200 miles away in the mountains and which later became the summer capital of the United Provinces. Naini Tal was discovered by "The Pilgrim" Mr. Barron who had his yacht carried up here in 1840.The Nainital Boat Club whose wooden Clubhouse still graces the edge of the lake, became the fashionable, focus of the community.

The Naini Tal lake - tal meaning lake - lies at about 6,400 feet a.s.l. Pockets of snow are found in Cheena (or Naini, 8,568 ft), the peak which dominates the lake, as late as March. Many people and birds move down from the hills to the plains in the winter months.

The Mutiny had left Naini Tal virtually unaffected. Refugees particularly from Rampur, Moradabad and Bareilly flooded the hill stations to escape the pillaging dacoits were inflicting on the plains people; other than that there was little upheaval. The nearest the mutineers got to Naini Tal was 11 miles away and 5,000 ft down the precipitous mountainside. According to a military report the greatest hardship was the shortage of beer! Had the violence reached the Tal Brewery Company, a branch of the Bareilly Beer Company, just two miles down the road from Naini Tal? The brewery wasn't built until 1875 and it is more than likely that dacoits and mutineers interrupted the supplies of beer coming from Bareilly. A more serious consequence of the mutiny was to send the price of land, houses and rents soaring - many well-established residents of Naini Tal made a killing.

The family traveled there across hill routes and along the edge of plains on what were pathways and bridle paths, the journey taking a month. Along the way they encountered tigers who had to be chased away from their camps. Mary Jane and the younger children traveled in a "doolie dak", a sedan or a box-like contrivance like chair, carried by four stalwart bearers and later, for the last steep ascent, in a dandy, which was a hammock suspended from a pole which one had to cling on to to prevent being thrown out. Neither method of travel was comfortable. The others traveled by foot or on ponies.

On arrival in Naini Tal the Corbetts' rented a house near the treasury building on the outskirts of Malli Tal Bazaar where they stayed until 1875 when they moved to a house they had had built on Alma.

Naini Tal was extremely cold in winter with deep snow and Christopher William was granted 10 acres of land on the edge of the plain below, just outside the village of Choti Haldwani at a place called Kaladhungi, a small Bhabar town 15 miles away from Naini Tal. Here he built a substantial house which he named Arundel and they planted most of the land with fruit trees and mango and the family moved there in the cold weather.

Christopher William and Mary Jane had eight children. The first was named after the hero Thomas Bartholomew, who, when he was old enough was employed by the post office. Their second child was Harriet, followed by Christopher Edward, John Quinton, Edith, Maurice, Margaret Winifred known as Maggie, Edward James (Jim) and lastly Archibald d'Arcy in 1879. Eugene Mary, Mary Jane's daughter from her marriage to Charles Doyle helped with the delivery of Edward James (known as Jim) who was born on 25 July 1875 (only 17 years after the end of the mutiny) at Naini Tal. He was always known as Jim.

The family always had various members of the family living with them. Christopher William's elder sister, Mary, and her husband Patrick Dease died leaving eight children, four of whom, Patrick Paget, Robert, Stephen and Carly Thomas, lived with the Corbetts. The first two of these became eminent engineers, the third became a doctor and the last the Superintendent of the post office. Harriet, Jim's sister, married Richard Nestor from Kaladhungi and Naini Tal and they had two children, Ray and Vivian, who were also brought up in the Corbett household. Christopher Edward, Jim's brother, married Helen Mary Nestor (Richard Nestor's sister).

John Quinton, Jim and sister Maggie were very close and their mother called them the 'Jam Sandwich'.

Mary Jane was Naini Tal's first estate agent negotiating property for rent, selling plots and, as time passed, she and Christopher William bought land about the town on which they built houses. These were sold from time to time to bring in a little income.

Joseph, the grandfather of Edward James (Jim) CorbettThe family were members of the church at Naini Tal which was called St John-in-the-Wilderness. The children were raised with the help of 'ayahs' and as they grew up learned the local tongue and two Indian dialects as well as Hindi. Jim became familiar with the local religion and Hinduism.

Early on, his mother and Eugene Mary acted as tutors to the children and the latest books were always available for them to read. A considerable amount of freedom appears to have been given to the children and for Jim the surrounding jungle must have proved a draw to him. Christopher William retired from the post office at Naini Tal in 1878 and was, by then, one of the city fathers.

On Thursday 16th September 1880 it started to rain, by Saturday 19th, 33 inches had fallen, Cheena had turned to mud with the consistency of porridge resulting in the great landslide. The Corbett family watched horrified from their house on Alma expecting to be carried away at any moment by the mud torrent. It missed them by a hundred yards and carried away parts of the Victoria Hotel in Naini Tal, burying several people. The side of the hillside then became fluid and a landslip took place carrying everything away including the rest of the hotel and those trying to extricate those buried in the earlier fall. 151 persons were killed. The Corbett's house in the valley was close to where this landslip took place.

On Easter Sunday 1881 Christopher William had sharp chest pains and died aged 58 on 21 April. He was buried at St John-in-the-Wilderness. Jim was six years old and his mother, Mary Jane, was left with 9 children to raise. After Christopher William's death they sold their house and moved across the valley, to a spot 1000 feet higher on the safer Ayarpata. The Alma house was dismantled and moved lock stock and barrel to the 1.7 acre site on Ayarpata where Mary had bought a plot in 1871. They named their new home Gurney House (ref 113 De on the map of Naini Tal). There was also enough room on this plot to build another house to rent called Clifton (ref. 54 De). (Joseph John Gurney (1788-1847) was an English philanthropist and a Quaker banker of Norwich. He and his sister. Mrs. Elizabeth Fry, were closely involved in prison reforms. Perhaps the house was named after him.)

The Corbett house (Gurney House) still stands, and contains some of the Corbett furniture, including their piano. There is a tall pile of sheet music, and among the books several prizes awarded to Maggie Corbett for her playing. The library was evidently a good one: besides theological and medical works, books on sport, natural history, travel and photography, the nineteenth-century poets and novelists are well represented, sometimes by first editions. The Corbett children had a cultured, comfortable home. For most of the years they lived in Naini Tal, Jim, Mary and the children spent the winter months in their Kaladhungi house Arundel, now the Corbett museum. Jim Corbett's dogs have very special graves in the garden especially his favorite spaniel called Robin.

Jim Corbett with LeopardEdward James (Jim) Corbett who had been born 25 July 1875 at Naini Tal became famous as a destroyer of man-eating tigers, naturalist and as an author. He grew up to be a tall, slim, attractive blue-eyed man with exceptional eyesight, hearing and powers of observation, and was known for his modesty, kindness and generosity, and loved by all. At an early age he spent nights alone in the jungle becoming familiar with the creatures of the jungle, their movements and habits. His mother and half-sister Mary, who were religious and intelligent and imbued with a spirit of service, courage and cheerfulness which had a strong influence on family life. All these qualities Jim inherited.

He went to the English High School called Oak Openings at 7,500 ft on Sherkadanda in Nainital. Oak Openings was part owned and run by an ex-Indian-Army-Officer nicknamed "Dead Eye-Dick". He was a cruel and ruthless man who would thrash the children in his care for the slightest misdemeanor. Oak Openings was Jim's first school. It is he who describes the atrocious beatings given to children as young as 6 or 7 both in lessons and during cadet corps training when Jim himself was only 10 years old.

Philander Smith CollegeThe Philander Smith's Institute, part of the American Mission Institute of Mussoorie, took over the school in 1905. It was greatly increased in size and renamed Philander Smith's College. At Philander Smith College and St Joseph's College, both at Naini Tal, Jim proved himself popular and was to excel in games. However he was not a great scholar.

In later years he gave talks to the boys of his old school which he illustrated with a 16 mm. film and sounds of the jungle. He could mimic the calls of a tiger and leopard, both male and female; in fact, he could mimic calls of all the animals he mentions in his books. The school in those days, was very close to the jungle where such sounds were quite common especially at night, so many of those listening to him would recognise what they were and couldn't be fooled. They must have sounded right because the real folk of the jungle were often fooled!

Leaving school he entered the service of the Bengal and North Western Railway when he was 20 as an Inspector of railway fuel at Mankapur on a salary of Rs100 a month (£36 13s). The exchange rate in 1895 was 1s 4d to the rupee, almost the same as in January 1978.) He soon received a transfer, as Transshipment Inspector. When he was 20, Jim took on the contract from the railways for handling the transshipment of goods across the Ganges, described in 'Mokameh Ghat'.

He helped to raise from Kumaon, during a recruitment campaign in the Great War, a force of over 5,000 and with himself as Captain took 500 of them to France in 1917. He returned with all but one in the following year. These he resettled in their Kumaon villages. With his usual generosity he gave his war bonus to build a soldiers' canteen. Thereafter, he saw fighting in the Third Afghan War, and in the Waziristan campaign serving as a Major from 1919 to 1921.

In about 1920, at the age of 45, he settled down at Naini Tal to look after his mother, his sister Maggie, and his step-sister Mary Doyle. A bequest in a will left him a house at Naini Tal and this allowed him to leave the railway. He was now able to give all his time to the people of Kumaon and their welfare. With his sister's help a surgery at the house was opened for treatment of the sick.

In 1922 he took a share with Percy Wyndham in a coffee estate on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro and used to go to it for about three months each year. Maggie testifies: 'As there was no proper living accommodation on the estate, nothing but huts, Jim set to work, and with his own hands laid every brick of a two-storeyed house, with a veranda upstairs. He was very pleased to find, on measuring the building when it was finished, that it was not out by an inch anywhere.' Mary Jane, an Anglican, lived into her eighties, dying on 16 May 1924 and she was buried at St John-in-the-Wilderness. The churchyard by then had been closed but was specially opened for her burial.

During his time in the railways, Jim spent many holidays at their winter home in Kaladhungi and in the early years of the century had bought the almost forsaken and deserted village, Choti Haldwani. Here he resettled the inhabitants and paid the villagers' taxes up to 1960. With a mile of wire he enclosed the area, divided it into plots, and built new houses. As he could afford it, he increased the circumference to three miles and built a 5-foot stone wall instead of the wire. He remained a resident of Kaladhungi, where he farmed and did small business in winter when not otherwise gainfully occupied arranging their shoots for high-ups in the Government and their guests. The village was soon flourishing. Corbett lived with his sisters at Naina Tal from April to October.

Jim Corbett, now a famous man after his classic 'Man-eaters of Kumaon' which had been dedicated to 'the gallant soldiers, sailors and airmen of the United Nations who during this war have lost their sight in the service of their country.' 'Man-eaters of Kumaon' was an immediate success in India and was chosen by book clubs in England and America, the first printing of the American Book-of-the-month Club being 250,000. It had been issued as a Talking Book for the Blind and translated into at least fourteen European languages (Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Serbo-Croat, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish), eleven Indian languages (Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Sindhi, Sinhalise, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu), Afrikaans and Japanese. All the royalties on the first edition went to St Dunstan's Hostel for Indian soldiers blinded in the war that was still being fought.

He completely identified himself with the local population which affectionately called him 'Carpet Sahib'. He always had a word of cheer for all those in trouble, a kindly nature and sympathetic attitude and was generous with his money. He was of middle size and rather dark. One could see him going about in shorts, shirt, a thick coat of coarse material and a hat. He never wore a tie.

Percy Wyndham spent most of his career hunting in Mirzapur district (the Wyndham Falls are named after him) or in the Naini Tal Terai. He was Jim Corbett's friend and a colourful person in his own right. He spent 12 years in the Kumaon Division as its Commissioner. Corbett was a constant companion of Mr. Wyndham whenever he was out looking for tigers in the Bhabar and Terai.

In his early life Jim was an excellent marksman and fisherman but in his later life he found photography of big game was preferable to shooting them. At some undetermined date, he resolved never again to shoot an animal except for food or if it was 'a dangerous' beat. In the early 1930's (he told Rev'd A. G. Atkins, pastor of the Union Church at Naini Tal) that having taken three officers out for a duck-shoot, he was sickened by the senseless slaughter of 300 birds.

His courage and patience is proved by the amount of film which he exposed in close proximity to the animals he photographed. He was strong and fit and able to endure hardship. For several months he went out daily and waited for a tiger to appear and obtained 'a long sequence of six superb specimens, of which the nearest was eight and the farthest thirty feet from his camera'. Now deposited in the British Museum they are unusual and remarkable records of Indian wild life.

He was a pioneer conservationist and began to give lectures to local schools and societies to stimulate awareness of the natural beauty surrounding them and the need to conserve forests and their wildlife. His fluency in animal languages was demonstrated to more critical audiences when he used them to call up a man-eater or to drown the whirr of his camera when filming tigers.

He was asked to undertake the shooting of his first two man-eaters in 1907. These were the Champawat tiger and the Panar tiger. He shot ten man-eaters altogether, the last being shot in 1938. It was his belief that a tiger or leopard was not by nature a man-eater but had received an injury and became one because it was unable to pursue it's normal prey any longer.

Jim Corbett's exciting accounts of the hunting and killing of these man-eaters which had killed almost 1,500 Indians, are related with modesty in three of his books: The Man-Eaters of Kumaon (1946), The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayang (1948), and the Temple Tiger and More Man-Eaters of Kumaon (1954). These forays meant days without sleep and food, nights sitting waiting for the tiger to appear, with his life always in danger. Because of his courage and resolve he received the love and sometimes worship of the people.

In the Second World War Jim Corbett asked for duty and raised a labour corps and recruited 1,400 Kumaons and served from 1940 to 1942 as a Deputy Military Vice-President of district soldiers' boards.

In 1942 an attack of typhus reduced his weight from 12 and a half stone to 7 stone and he was told he would have to spend the rest of his life in a wheel-chair. Refusing to give way he recovered and was commissioned Lieutenant-Colonel and trained men for jungle warfare in Burma despite serious illness. After a year of this strenuous life, in training camps in Central India, he had a bad attack of malaria.

Corbett in KenyaNeither Maggie nor Jim could face the thought of continuing to live, after the death of the other in India, so they went to Kenya in 1947 and settled in Nyeri, Kenya, in the house which Lord Baden-Powell had built, lived and died in.

Much of his time was spent filming wild life and to writing and he was made Honorary Officer, Royal National Parks of Kenya and an Honorary Assistant Game Warden. Soon after his arrival in Nyeri Jim founded a Wild Life Preservation Society and became its Honorary Secretary.

It was at Nyeri that he wrote most of his books. He and Maggie sat together night after night before their wood fire, he at his typewriter and she brewing the after-dinner cup of tea. She said of him: 'He worked very hard; did his own typing, all with one finger, and made four copies of each book - three for the publishers, London, New York and Bombay, and the fourth copy for ourselves, known as 'The Home Copy'. He was very neat and if there was even one mistake on a page, he would scrap the page and type it all over again. He always wanted a sentence to read 'smoothly' and would take infinite pains in making it do so'.

He received the Volunteer Decoration (1920), the Kaisar-i-Hing gold medal (1928), the O.B.E., (1942) and the C.I.E.-Companion of the Indian Empire (1946). In India he was granted a privilege only given once before - the freedom of the forests.

Jim Corbett was the most modest, companionable, and unassuming of men. He never sought the limelight but was publicly honoured by the Government of India both before and after Independence.

In 1952 (by then aged 80) he received a note from an aide to Princess Elizabeth requesting him to meet her and Prince Philip at Treetops that afternoon. Treetops was a game observation platform owned by the Outspan Hotel. The platform was over 30 ft up in the branches of a Ficus tree and was reached by a ladder. At the top was a tree house and the platform overlooked a water hole and saltlick. The accommodation comprised of a dining room, three bedrooms, a toilet, a room for the resident guard and another for staff. Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip were paying a state visit to Kenya and spending part of their time about 20 miles away from Treetops. Jim identified animals for the royal party and when they retired for the night at Treetops he sat awake and on guard at the top of the ladder, with his army blanket across his shoulders and his rifle in his lap. There he spent the night. The night on which King George VI died. In the Treetops register, kept for listing the names of animals seen, he wrote of that night 'For the first time in the history of the world a young girl climbed into a tree one day a Princess, and after having what she described as her 'most thrilling experience' she climbed down from the tree the next day a Queen.'

Jim died at Nyeri on 19 April 1955 and was buried in St Peter's churchyard , the same cemetery as Baden-Powell.
In 1957 the game sanctuary in Kumaon was named after him by the Indian Government. It had been established in Garhwal in 1935. This was in recognition of one who had dedicated his life to the service of the simple hill folks of Kumaon. Corbett National Park, in the state of Uttaranchal, erstwhile state of Uttar Pradesh, exhibits a wide variety of India's wildlife in the foothills of the Himalayas.
In January 1976 the Government of India issued a 25-paise stamp to commemorate Jim's birth in 1875. A new, Annamese, race of tigers was, in 1968, named Panthera tigris corbetti.

Jim also wrote My India (1952), which is largely autobiographical; Jungle Lore (1953); Treetops (1955) and published posthumously, an account of the visit of the Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh to the hotel in the treetops near Nyeri. Over a million of his books in English had been sold by 1957 and translations in eighteen languages had been published.


Some of the popular books written by Col. Corbett, (Oxford India Publications)
1. Man-eaters of Kumaon
2. The Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag
3. My India
4. Jungle Lore
5. Temple Tigers & More Man-eaters of Kumaon
6. Tree Tops
7. Jim Corbett's India

Bibliography:
Dictionary of National Biography: Who Was Who 1951-1960
Carpet Sahib, A Life of Jim Corbett by Martin Booth
Jim Corbett's India, Stories selected by R. E. Hawkins.
Recollections of Peter Smith of Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex who once lived at Naini Tal where his father taught at Philander Smith College.

Source.....
The Corbett Study Group